Review Summary

There is something irresistible — and also something questionable — about the artistic impulse to filter fictional accounts of real-world horror through the eyes of children. The juxtaposition of innocence and cruelty, of a naïve ignorance of political causes with a vivid understanding of their human effect, can refresh and deepen our perception of past atrocities. But there are risks, too: of sentimentality, of vagueness and of a wide-eyed naïveté that mystifies events we have an ethical duty to see as clearly as possible. For every “Pan’s Labyrinth,” which mines archetypes and fairy tales to unearth the hidden truth of Spanish fascism, there is “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” which turns the Holocaust into maudlin kiddie-kitsch. — A. O. Scott